Unlocking Storage Optimizations: Smart Tiering for Blobs and ADLS in Azure Storage
We are excited to introduce the public preview of smart tier for Azure Blob and Azure Data Lake Storage. Smart tier is a fully managed, automated data tiering solution that takes the guesswork and manual effort out of optimizing your storage costs. Smart tier continuously analyzes your data’s access patterns and automatically moves objects between the hot, cool, and cold tiers. Smart tier will keep regularly accessed objects on the hot capacity tier to optimize transaction costs and moves inactive objects after 30 days to the cool tier capacity tier and after an additional 60 days of inactivity to the cold capacity tier. If you access an object in cool or cold tiers again, it’s instantly promoted back to the hot tier, restarting the cycle. This ensures your data is always in the most cost-effective tier with zero manual intervention, making it the ideal online tier for datasets with mixed or unknown access patterns. Getting started Using smart tier is quick and easy: Enabling smart tier is simple: Just select smart tier as the default access tier through the storage account configuration for any storage account with zonal redundancy. Smart tier is available in all zonal public cloud regions, supporting both flat and hierarchical namespaces. Billing is straightforward: You will pay the regular hot, cool, and cold capacity rates, with no extra charges for tier transitions, early deletion, or data retrieval. Even moving existing objects into smart tier does not incur tier change fees. There’s just a small monitoring fee for the orchestration. Smart tier is configured at the account level. It can be configured via API or the Azure portal as the default access tier setting for new and existing storage accounts. Existing objects following the default access tier setting from the account will be moved to smart tier automatically. Objects that are explicitly tiered, i.e. to the hot tier, will remain in the same account and will not be moved to other capacity tiers. Smart tier will always keep small objects that are below 128 KiB in size in the hot capacity tier for efficiency and those objects will not incur a monitoring charge. If objects below 128 KiB increase in size, the smart tiering patterns apply for those objects as well. The automatic down tiering of inactive data, paired with the billing model simplifications of Smart tier can lead to large cost savings over time. In the metrics view of the storage account you can see the distribution across the capacity tiers for smart tiered objects by both object count and capacity. This account shows smart tier in action, moving inactive objects to the cool and cold capacity tier, thereby drastically reducing the capacity charges without any manual intervention. "2 years ago, Qumulo partnered with Microsoft to deliver the first truly elastic, unlimited capacity, fully managed file system, Azure Native Qumulo, which was built on Azure Blob," said Brandon Whitelaw SVP of Product at Qumulo. "Qumulo shared feedback with Microsoft on our ideal solution for data tiering and Microsoft clearly delivered, meeting all expectations. With today's smart tier announcement, Qumulo will immediately enhance our offerings with these new capabilities, delivering greater functionality and control over data lifecycle management. We are thrilled with the feature set Azure is delivering at launch” Note that smart tier is not supported with append and page blobs. Smart tier is the ideal tier to choose when you are looking to store your data on standard online tiers but are not fully aware of the data access patterns or do not want to manage data transitions across online tiers. Objects managed by smart tier are not subject to lifecycle management policies, ensuring that automated tiering decisions are based solely on access patterns. Smart tier for block blobs is now available in public preview for both Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage for storage accounts with zonal redundancies, including ZRS, GZRS and RA-GZRS. Unlock cost savings by adding smart tier to your blob storage accounts in one easy step: https://aka.ms/BlobSmarttier. Please reach out to us for any feedback or questions, we would love to hear from you: smartblob@microsoft.com
Reduce latency and enhance resilience with Azure Files zonal placement
We are pleased to announce the General Availability of zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS in select regions. Zonal placement enables you to pin Azure Files storage accounts to a specific Availability Zone within a region — giving you better control over data locality, resilience, and lower latency for your workloads. Benefits of zonal placement Azure Files provides both local-redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options today. ZRS is leveraged for workloads that require storage-level replication across zones. For applications using Azure Files Premium LRS with application-level replication, customers can now pin storage resources to a specific Availability Zone to co-locate storage with compute resources like Virtual Machines (VMs). Zonal placement can be leveraged with both SMB and NFS shares, making it ideal for latency sensitive Windows and Linux workloads including databases, enterprise platforms, DevOps tools, and line-of-business applications. Leveraging zonal placement With zonal placement, you can Reduce latency: Choose the same availability zone for storage and compute resources, optimizing latency-sensitive workloads and reducing cross-zone network latency by 10-40%. Isolate failure domains: Limit exposure to potential zonal outages, by aligning the compute and storage resources of your application in a single zone. Design for zone-aware high availability: Build resiliency with application-level replication across compute and storage resources in each zone. To configure zonal placement for your workload: Select a specific Availability Zone when creating a new Azure Files Premium LRS storage account or update an existing Azure Files Premium LRS storage account to be Availability Zone aware. Allocate your compute resources in the same zone as your premium storage account zone. Get started today Start leveraging zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS today. Zonal placement is available in select Azure regions that support Premium LRS and Availability Zones; for the latest list of supported regions, please refer to the zonal placement for Azure File Shares | Microsoft Learn. Whether you’re provisioning new storage or enhancing existing deployments, Zonal placement empowers you to align your compute and storage resources within the same Availability Zone to minimize latency and control availability. Build more efficient, reliable, and zone-aware solutions with Azure Files—your data is ready for what’s next. For any questions, please reach out to the team at azurefiles@microsoft.com.Cloud Native Identity with Azure Files: Entra-only Secure Access for the Modern Enterprise
Azure Files introduces Entra only identities authentication for SMB shares, enabling cloud-only identity management without reliance on on-premises Active Directory. This advancement supports secure, seamless access to file shares from anywhere, streamlining cloud migration and modernization, and reducing operational complexity and costs.
